I write a weekly travel column for the Columbia Daily Tribune. This blog had focused on stories about American Indian Sites and includes more pictures than my column allows for. I added some stories about native people in other places and will now be putting in stories about American Presidents homes and museums and stories I have written about historical places and museums in the United States.

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Museum of World Treasures

MUSEUM OF WORLD TREASURES

How
did one man manage to collect so many artifacts in one lifetime?We were at the Museum of World Treasures in
Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by items from all over the world anddifferent historical periods.The collection has a tremendous range from Logan the
Tylosaur, a giant fish who once patrolled the Western Inland sea over Kansas, to
vases from ancient Greece to Bios on modern presidents.

We were
told the collection was started by Dr. Jon Kardatzke, and he had put them into
the museum in 2001 with the intent of educating the community.It was a hit. As more visitors came in, the collection
received more attention from other fanatical collectors who also wanted to
share the materials they had obsessively collected.

Now
the collections have been expanded by 30 major private collectors and
additional material from another 300.No
wonder it is such an overwhelming collection.

What
was the most impressive?The
displays on the presidents of the U.S., which included such things assigned reports, letters and quotations from
each.So impressive I will write a
separate story on it.

The next most impressive displays were the
dinosaurs that were the equal of what we have seen in major museums across the
country. The museum had to move to
expanded quarters when they added three giant dinosaurs including Ivan the T. Rex.

Ivan the T. Rex

The collection of Buddha statues from
around the world had a number of body
shapes with several being the expected overweight ones. For example, the Laughing Buddha weighs two
and a half tons.

A
herd of Cape buffalo carved out of iron wood caught our attention.How can anyone do an intricate job like that? How do they keep the legs
coming out of the right bodies?

A small room was filled with materials from
Egyptian tombs including two female mummies, some Egyptian coffins, figurines, jewelry, and animal mummies.

We were shown the reality of cowboy life,
low paid, hardworking and many of them black. Something we were not told in our
books and movies that instead conveyed the romantic lives of the American
cowboy.

Reproduction of
a scene from a WWII Air Force Base

Reproduction
of a scene from the Civil War

America’s
wars?Each is covered with artifacts and
stories.At the entrance to the Civil War
we watched a movie on Quantrill’s raid into Lawrence, Kansas, where his bushwackers killed most of the men in town and successfully escaped the army
who pursued him.

One of the collectors must have been
obsessed with uniforms for in several collection WWI and WWII we see the uniforms
of all of the participants from different countries along with the rifles they
used.Each of the wars also has a scene
constructed of artifacts and manikins showing a typical scene of that war.

"One of a kind display" includes the Scarecrow’s pitchfork
from the Wizard of Oz, a portion of the Berlin Wall, the scalp of George
Custer’s nephew Henry Armstrong Reed taken by one of the Indians at Custer’s
last stand.

Scavenger hunts are encouraged to get younger visitors involved.For pre- kindergarten to 2nd grade
a set of pictures are given of objects to be looked for: Logan the Tylosaur,
World War II era baby carriage,Civil
War US Cavalry soldier hat.

Third grade to fifth graders were asked to find such things as:What hairstyle does the mummy on the right
have? Find the clock in the Famous Authors collection.What famous author did it belong to?

For the sixth grade to adult
things get harder: What is the laughing Buddha holding in
his hands? What did soldiers fighting in Vietnam sometimes use, against regulation,
to heat their meals?

The above questions also gives a taste of the wide range of subjects covered
by the collection.

This is one of those museums that almost demands the visitor come back
to see more.